In 2020 in a small California mountain town five women disappeared.

I found out what happened to all of them except one a woman known as Dea whose estate is worth

millions of dollars. I'm Lucy Sheriff. Over the past

four years I've spoken with Dia's family and friends and I've discovered that

everyone has a different version of events.

Hear the story on Where's Deer.

Listen on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of I Heart Radio.

Hi, my name is Robert Lamb, and this is The Monster Fact, a short form series from stuff to blow your mind focusing in on mythical creatures, ideas, and monsters in time. In our look at the xenomorph life cycle, we've finally come to the horrifying face hugger.

This is the creature that emerges from the

traditional xenomorph egg, aggressively attaches itself to the face of a

human host, implants an embryo in the comatose host organism, and then dies. The embryo of course

develops into a standard xenomorph which will explore in the next episode.

There are a few different ways to look at the basics of the facehucker.

On one level we can ground it in the dark surrealism of H.R. Giger,

another twist on sexual reproduction, Freudian death drive, and physiology.

But just as we previously faced the question of whether the xenomorph egg is an organism in and of itself,

we must also consider this with the facehugger to some degree.

In How Stuffworks.com's How the Alien Xenomorph works from 2012, I explored the idea that the facehugger might

not constitute a true organism at all, but would

rather be a delivery system for the embryo, no more an organism than a sperm cell is an organism.

...